Summary

The guards hung me by my wrists
from the ceiling for eight days. After a few days of hanging, being denied
sleep, it felt like my brain stopped working. I was imagining things. My feet
got swollen on the third day. I felt pain that I have never felt in my entire
life. It was excruciating. I screamed that I needed to go to a hospital, but
the guards just laughed at me.

—Elias
describing how he was tortured in Branch 285 of the Department of General
Intelligence in Damascus

Since the beginning of anti-government protests in March
2011, Syrian authorities have subjected tens of thousands of people to
arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions, enforced disappearances, ill-treatment,
and torture using an extensive network of detention facilities, an archipelago
of torture centers, scattered throughout Syria.

Based on more than 200 interviews with former detainees,
including women and children, and defectors from the Syrian military and
intelligence agencies, this report focuses on 27 of these detention facilities.
For each facility, most of them with cells and torture chambers and one or
several underground floors, we provide the exact location, identify the
agencies responsible for operating them, document the type of ill-treatment and
torture used, and name, to the extent possible, the individuals running them.
The facilities included in this report are those for which multiple witnesses
have indicated the same location and provided detailed descriptions about the
use of torture. The actual number of such facilities is likely much higher.

In charge of Syria’s network of detention facilities are the
country’s four main intelligence agencies, commonly referred to collectively as
the mukhabarat:

the Department of Military Intelligence
(Shu`bat al-Mukhabarat al-`Askariyya);

the Political Security Directorate
(Idarat al-Amn al-Siyasi);

the General Intelligence Directorate
(Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-`Amma); and

Each of these four agencies maintains
central branches in Damascus as well as regional, city, and local branches
across the country. In virtually all of these branches there are detention
facilities of varying size.

Syria’s intelligence agencies have
historically operated independently from each other with no clear boundaries to
their areas of jurisdiction. Relying on the country’s overbroad emergency law,
the mukhabarat has a long history of detaining people without arrest warrants
and denying detainees other due process safeguards. Lifting the emergency law
in April 2011 changed little in practice. Legislation
limiting the time that a person can be lawfully held in detention without
judicial review to 60 days for certain crimes, simultaneously introduced in
April 2011, does not meet the requirement in international law that judicial
review should take place “promptly.” Furthermore, several former detainees
interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that they had been held without judicial
review even longer than the 60 days permitted by Syrian law.

To manage the thousands of people detained in
the context of anti-government demonstrations, the authorities also established
numerous temporary unofficial holding centres in places such as stadiums,
military bases, schools, and hospitals where the authorities rounded up and
held people during massive detention campaigns before transporting them to
branches of the intelligence agencies.

All of the witnesses interviewed by Human
Rights Watch described conditions of detention—extreme overcrowding, inadequate
food, and routine denial of necessary medical assistance—that would by
themselves amount to ill-treatment and, in some cases, torture. But almost all
the former detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch also said they had been
subjected to torture or witnessed the torture of others during their detention.
Interrogators, guards, and officers used a broad range of torture methods,
including prolonged beatings, often with objects such as batons and wires,
holding the detainees in painful stress positions for prolonged periods of
time, often with the use of specially devised equipment, the use of
electricity, burning with car battery acid, sexual assault and humiliation, the
pulling of fingernails, and mock execution. Altogether Human Rights Watch documented
more than 20 different methods of torture used in Syria’s archipelago of
torture centers.

Most of the detainees interviewed said they
had been subjected to several forms of torture, often inflicted with escalating
levels of pain. At times detainees were forced to remain naked or in their
underwear while they were tortured. Several former detainees interviewed
for this report told Human Rights Watch that they had witnessed people dying
from torture in detention. Human Rights Watch also received information about
deaths in custody from families or friends of the victims.

A former intelligence officer described to
Human Rights Watch the various methods used at the Air Force Intelligence base
at the Mezzeh airport in Damascus:

The mildest form of torture is hitting people with batons
on their arms and legs and not giving them anything to eat or drink. Then they
would hang the detainees from the ceiling by their hands, sometimes for hours
or days. I saw it while I was talking to the interrogators. They used electric
stun-guns and an electroshock machine, an electric current transformer. It is a
small machine with two wires with clips that they attach to nipples and a knob
that regulates the current. In addition, they put people in coffins and
threatened to kill them and close the coffin. People were wearing underwear.
They pour hot water on people and then whip them. I’ve also seen drills there,
but I’ve never seen them being used. I’ve also seen them using martial art
moves, like breaking ribs with a knee kick. They put pins under your feet and
hit you so that you step on them. I also heard them threatening to cut off the
detainees’ penises.

A 31-year-old detainee who was detained in Idlib governorate
in June described to Human Rights Watch how intelligence agents tortured him in
the Idlib Central Prison:

They forced me to undress. Then they started squeezing my
fingers with pliers. They put staples in my fingers, chest, and ears. I was
only allowed to take them out if I spoke. The nails in the ears were the most
painful. They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric
shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would
never see my family again. They tortured me like this three times over three
days.

While most of the torture victims
interviewed by Human Rights Watch were young men aged between 18 and 35,
interviewed victims also included children, women, and elderly individuals.
Defecting members of the intelligence agencies told Human Rights Watch that
they either witnessed or participated in the torture and ill-treatment of
detainees, corroborating accounts by former detainees.

Human Rights Watch has documented the use of torture and ill-treatment in
the following detention facilities:

In the vast majority of detention cases
documented by Human Rights Watch, family members could obtain no information
about the fate or whereabouts of the detainees and detainees were not allowed
any contact with the outside world. Many of the detentions can therefore be
qualified as enforced disappearances.

Human Rights Watch calls on the UN Security
Council to ensure accountability for these crimes by referring the situation in
Syria to the International Criminal Court. Human Rights Watch also calls on the
United Nations Security Council to ensure that the Syrian government grants
recognized international detention monitors access to all detention facilities,
including those mentioned in this report.